Experience

There were a lot of new, unknown players going deep in the WSOP this year, too, also in the Main Event. I talked about it with a friend and fellow player, and we agreed. It was an epiphany not really an epiphany at all, but common sense.

People play there for the first time the moment they turn twenty-one. They usually start playing poker on the web when they are eighteen, and often before that, too, on the parents’ accounts or similar. During those three years or more they gain more experience, play more hands than Doyle Brunson did in a lifetime.

When Justin Bonomo claims he has played far more hands than Brunson, he isn't bragging. When Annette Obrestad won WSOPE Main Event last year she beat a lot of the those coined as the best players in the world.

And so on. The time when established players could just sit down by a given table or join a given field and dominate is long gone.

It's a brave new world.